Statement by the Chair of the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality following the publication of a study on the lack of sex and gender variables in many COVID-19 clinical studies.
A paper published in Nature Communications on Tuesday shows that only 4% of studies investigating therapeutic approaches for the treatment of COVID-19 registered on ClinicalTrials.gov explicitly reported a plan to include sex and/or gender as an analytical variable. Commenting on that study, Evelyn Regner (S&D, AT), Chair of the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, stated: “Thanks to EIGE‘s Gender Equality Index, we already are aware of the fact that gender is often not taken into account in medical research, and now we know thanks to Dr. Sabine Oertelt-Prigione and her colleagues that this was also the case in the clinical trials for anti-COVID-19 treatments – only 4% of them looked at differences by gender and sex. This missing data can heavily affect women as shown by research on heart attacks, for example. We therefore have to ensure that the factor of gender and sex is taken into account in all clinical trials and research in general. Only then do we know if there are differences and which ones. Such information can be crucial in saving lives and would secure equal access to treatments.”
The inclusion of sex as a variable could help in the identification of effective interventions and provide insights into COVID-19 pathology. Gender can affect access to testing, diagnosis, medical care and treatments and influences the availability of social, economic and logistical support. Excluding sex differences in reporting results of clinical trials could lead to an increase in the risk of side effects for the excluded sex, while not addressing gender as a variable misses an opportunity to address healthcare inequality.
